That was after Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday hit up the Veterans of Foreign Wars with a similar appeasement-themed message. Cheney derided "self-defeating pessimism," which is rich from a White House so low on realism.

Don and Dick, our own dogs of war.

Fair-minded people erupted at the second tier's outrageous (as well as historically incomplete comparison) performances, especially by that of Rumsfeld, who has thoroughly politicized what should be among the least partisan offices in the government.

Then President Bush goes to the Legion shindig on Thursday and takes a modestly higher road. He invokes Nazism and Communism (again with short shrift to history), but doesn't quite put war critics in the tank with Hitler, Stalin or Idi Amin, for that matter. Thanks, for small favors.

This was the more delicious for coming the week after Bush swore: "I will never question the patriotism of somebody who disagrees with me."

How did you know he didn't mean that? His lips were moving. (Bush was, in case you missed it, mildly chided by Rush Limbaugh for not more forceful in pulling the patriotism trigger.)

As we come to Labor Day, the traditional beginning of the hard slog to the first Tuesday in November, it's not too difficult to imagine Karl Rove urging Republican candidates over the next two months to paint small Austro-Bavarian moustaches on pictures of their Democratic opponents.

Bush & Co. are hoping that their latest reiteration of the Iraq pipedream, reheated with the Hitler stuff, will work just enough, just in time, with just the right voters.

Unfortunately, history is on their side, given the elections of 2002 and 2004. Have the voters, perchance, had enough?

The White House has used the run-up to Labor Day not only to try to get out ahead of Democrats before Congress reconvenes for a fitful pre-election session but also to pre-empt a small but increasing amount of dissent within its own congressional party.

It will be only just if the performances of the last week (and those yet to come by string of Bush speeches on Iraq as Armageddon— backfires with moderate voters whom the Republicans need to keep their majority in the House and possibly in the Senate.

As easy as it is to lambast Chamberlain and the Munich agreement almost 70 years on, a slick, elliptical denunciation such as Rumsfeld's leaves a good bit out.

In 1938, Britain was barely 20 years past the butchery of World War I. Virtually a generation of its young men was missing, buried in fields of poppies just across the Channel. There was virtually no appetite for another superpower confrontation that would engulf Europe and the world.

In contemporary terms, imagine how justifiably faint might be the American appetite for armed conflict, given the quagmire of Iraq and disquieting backward slide in Afghanistan, if in possibly far less than 20 years it is necessary to confront an Iran or North Korea.

What if our Babylonian misadventure, no matter how well intentioned, makes whatever then-current administration shy, with popular backing, from standing up immediately and militarily even though that were required?

That would, indeed, be a bad seed of our present policy. Even in the growing canon of Bush stumblings, that would be an unintended consequence of possibly cosmic proportions.

It's also interesting to recall that those three years before Pearl Harbor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was offering Washington's then-good offices to buck up minor European powers, many of whom who were soon to be gobbled up in Nazi Germany's voracious maw.

Is it possible I'm overlooking some move early in the Bush administration, before Sept. 11, 2001, to steel non-loony Islamic regimes against the surge of radicalism?

In his memoirs, Duff Cooper, who resigned as Britain's First Lord of the Admiralty to protest Munich, said that FDR's proposal, even with its imperfections, "might have proved one of the turning-points in European history and would probably have averted the coming war."

To bad historians won't be able to write that about any Bush pre-9/11 effort.

Is it also possible that in all these testosterone-laden World War II comparisons that Bush is thinking of himself as Winston Churchill.